Me being curious, I pressed the link and I was greeted by some sort of Stack Overflow login screen. However, this login screen is missing the Google and Facebook login options we have at our normal, so I cannot see the details.

My questions:

Where is Gmail getting the URL from?

Are any other login features planned for that website?

Is there a change that this feature might not be intended to be exposed? And is this then a bug?

2 Answers
2

You reached ZenDesk, which is the ticketing system the Community Team currently uses.

I wasn't aware that it sent that "view ticket" link, but I just edited a setting, which should stop it from being sent out again.

By e-mailing us, either directly or by using the "contact us" page, the system will automatically create a pseudo-account without a password linked to your address, which is only used internally for us to be able to organise all the e-mails for us.

ZenDesk, unfortunately, offers us no possibility to just disable the Web Portal. This means that anyone who, like you, is able to find it, should be able to set an account on ZenDesk and follow the status of their tickets from the portal, instead of from the comfort of their inbox.
However, we'd really rather not have the portal, so we don't prompt you to register there, or even link you to it — or at least we thought we didn't!
Your messages sometimes jump from one employee to another, and back, and we change its status between these changes too. However, this is something that, ideally, you should not be seeing — only because these statuses only mean something to us, and we don't want our users to see their tickets randomly changing status without any reply back from us. As such, we've disabled the option that allows a user to then request a password to the automatically created account.

As I mentioned, anyone can do that, as long as their e-mail is not yet taken. However, we see no benefit in doing that, since you'll only see what will seem like random status changes.

should be able to set an account on ZenDesk and follow the status of their tickets from the portal I actually have tried this in the past, and wasn't able to. I think you might have already had some kind of new account verification set up, preventing random users from creating their own accounts. Or maybe I just didn't understand the UI.
– Jeremy BanksMar 22 '16 at 17:41

Or you most likely tried to do it with the e-mail from which you usually contact us, which already has an account associated with it, albeit without a password — just like I described above ;)
– JNat♦Mar 22 '16 at 18:03

It would be so cool if I could follow the status of these tickets created when I use the "contact us". I actually tried signing up on that site with a different email, but it's completely empty for me. I wonder what would happen if I submit a ticket from there or post something on the "forum" ?
– JonasCz - Reinstate MonicaMar 22 '16 at 20:04

We'd reply to that ticket normally. And you would, indeed, be able to follow the status of the tickets. However, as I mentioned, they would mean little to you, since we use them internally in a way that would seem arbitrary to end-users, and changes in status would not always mean interactions between us and you.
– JNat♦Mar 23 '16 at 9:42

It's a feature in Zendesk that appears to be enabled for the SE helpdesk.

Probably not, as Oded already mentioned the ticket system is used internally by SE and not accessible for end-users.

It might be. I can figure that SE staff has a use for the link in their mailbox (if that's in GMail/Google Apps), but I don't think they mean to send out the view link to the end-users, as it has no use to them.